This invention relates to communicating voice information over a channel such as a telephone communication channel.
Microphones used in voice transmission systems typically pick up ambient or background sounds, called noise, along with the voices they are intended to pick up. In voice transmission systems in which the microphone is at some distance from the speaker(s), for example, systems used in video and audio telephone conference environments, background noises are a cause of poor audio quality since the noise is added onto the speech picked up by a microphone. By their nature and intended use, these systems must pick up sounds from all locations surrounding their microphones, and these sounds will include background noise.
Fan noise, originating from HVAC systems, computers, and other electronic equipment, is the predominant source of noise in most teleconferencing environments.
A good noise suppression technique will reduce the perception of the background noise while simultaneously not affecting the quality or intelligibility of the speech. In general it is an object of this invention to suppress any constant noise, narrowband or wideband, that is added onto the speech picked up by a single microphone. It is a further object of this invention to reduce fan noise that is added onto the speech picked up by a single microphone.